Another badge of honour for Muscat’s Malta: listed with countries which use North Korean slave labour

The US State Department strategy report for the US Senate and House of Representatives has listed Malta as a country which uses North Korean slave labour.

The full roll of honour of countries worldwide which have arrangements with the North Korean dictatorship to import slave labour from that country is exactly what you would expect: Angola, Burma, Cambodia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Laos, Poland, Malaysia, Malta, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Senegal, Singapore, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

Why would I expect of it of Poland? Well, the candidate they proposed for the European Court of Auditors, who was interviewed just before our very own Toni Abela, was a former Soviet-era judge in the Soviet-era kangaroo courts of that country. He didn’t make it, either. As for the other countries on that list…well.

Malta began issuing visas for North Korean slaves in 2013, after Muscat’s party was elected to power. They work in construction and in the Chinese-state-owned clothing factory, Leisure Clothing. The matter, in fact, came to light only when the Leisure Clothing indentured-labour scandal broke, almost two years ago now, and The Malta Independent was given what the Leisure Clothing management hoped would be a public-relations interview with workers on the factory floor. But because the interview was arranged by the terminally ignorant Adrian Grech Cumbo, who probably hasn’t a clue what North Korea is about, one of the ‘happy workers’ put forward for interview was a young woman who, when asked to say where she is from, blithely said: “North Korea”.

From that point on, it was all systems go – except, of course, with the police. The scandal was followed up in the Maltese press, taken up in the international press, brought up in Malta’s parliament, raised in the European Parliament in February this year, and was the subject of one of the most talked-about documentaries on German national television some months ago.

North Korea is cut off from world trade and has found a creatively foul way to acquire foreign currency: by exporting its people as slaves to corrupt countries and seizing their earnings. This article explains how and why it happens.